Damon Albarn Cut Every Reference to Trump on Gorillaz’s New Album

“I don’t want to give the most famous man on earth any more fame, particularly,” he told Billboard. “He doesn’t need it!”

Gorillaz's first full-length project in seven years, Humanz, is out April 28. The four tracks we've heard from it so far—from January's "Hallelujah Money," released on the eve of Trump's inauguration, through the Vince Staples-featuring "Ascension"—have been lyrically apocalyptic cuts: power grabs, falling skies, Book of Revelation musings. In an interview with Zane Lowe two weeks ago, Pusha T confirmed that Humanz is, in part, about the racist, misogynistic mess of insecurity currently occupying the White House, even going so far as to say that Damon Albarn built the record around the worst-case-scenario of a Trump presidency. "I wrote from the perspective of that day of a Trump win," he told Lowe. "Then I started wondering, 'what type of crystal ball does this guy [Albarn] have? Why are you even asking me to even think along these lines? [...] He was first. I don't think that he thought he was going to win, but he definitely conceptualized this whole thing."

Albarn himself sat down for an interview with Billboard, published today, and confirmed Push's comments. "What would happen if the world was turned, in some unthinkable way, on its head?," he asked Andrew Unterberger, in reference to the God-awful 16 months that culminated in America's debasement. "Trump's ascension was one of the sources of energy that we meditated on, when it was like, 'Ahh, that's ridiculous, that could never happen.'"

Albarn decided, however, that there should be no explicit talk of the allegedly sexually aggressive billionaire in the songs themselves; essentially Albarn combed through Humanz and scrubbed any mention of Trump. "There's no references to [Trump] on the record," he told Billboard. "In fact, any time when anyone made any reference, I edited it out. I don't want to give the most famous man on earth any more fame, particularly. He doesn't need it!"

Here's hoping that Donald Trump catches onto the interview and fires off a shitty, misspelled tweet at Albarn before going back to the Oval Office to talk with America's Worst Musicians.